[Gllug] UKUUG

Tue Jul 3 08:06:36 UTC 2001

Hi Richard,

Sorry, I don't think I actually spotted you to say hello!

Nick says someone said hello to him, but he was so hot (and in his
not-unusual absent minded mode) that he forgot entirely about GLLUG and
couldn't figure out who you were ;-)

Anyway, the event was not the best organised thing in the world, and in
desperate need of air conditioning, but the content was nearly all of an
excellent quality and level. Here's my brief memories of the first day for
those interested....

The IBM marketing guy (Nick Davis) was extremely embarrassing and there was
a sad moment of realisation that much of IBM's involvement with Linux is
done without much understanding of what is going on and apparently just in
an attempt to make as much money as possible at any cost out of the latest
buzzword. Of course we shouldn't mind that much I suppose, but I couldn't
help thinking that many of us don't really care if Linux is the market
leader in E-commerce management solutions and various other acronyms which
even when explained just sounded like BS.

His presentation started off on the wrong foot when talking with a bunch of
Linux developers..."What is Linux?". The guy quickly realised his
presentation wasn't relevant, and resorted to asking everyone to pass on the
buzzwords and hype to our friends instead.

There was an amusing part when questions were asked about IBM's various
marketing and development strategies (afterall the title of this talk was
"Recent & Future Linux Developments at IBM") and (I don't remember the
specific questions, someone else might) the IBM chap looked confused and
said he had had no idea this was going on, and couldn't answer the question.
He was also very awkward and non-specific about their Open Source
commitments and plans. He did tell us the price of their z series machines
and how good their cluster solutions were though ;-)

Talking of clusters, Robert J Gautier of Ateb Ltd. told us all about his
Design and management of a 64 node Brute-Force cluster. This was fascinating
because he described really what seemed the most heath-robinson "rubber
bands, string and sellotape" affair. It was a good example of how you can
easily hack together something the works using Linux/unix and it's various
tools and languages and the problems you can meet when doing so. I asked him
why he chose to use Tcl as his glue language as oppose to anything else (I
had Python and perl in mind for example) and he said "It's what I knew at
the time". This is a good answer of course, but I'm only pleased what he
knew at the time wasn't Visual Basic.

Bo Thorsen from SuSE gave us a great insight into the process of porting
Linux to a new architecture and had us all interested in the next generation
AMD 64 bit x86 chip. He showed us his Simco hardware simulator (kind of like
VMWARE with hardware specs you can design) and we even saw "ls" running in
64bit mode ;-)

I found some of the finer details of Andrew Arcangeli's (Again from SuSE
labs) talk on vsyscalls a little hard going, especially in the sauna
environment and with his fairly strong accent (Italian I guess, but it
seemed to have strong Russian influences),. The ideas and results of his
research and programming sound excellent and are I have no doubt be a major
optimisation to the application kernel/userspace interaction. The basic
concept here is that syscalls such as gettimeofday are very fast internally
and are called a large number of times, very often by some applications. (In
our own experience, Java servlet engines for instance seem to do very little
else!). In order to execute these commands, an application has to enter and
exit kernel space, and there is this extra layer which slows things down.
Moving gettomeofday into userspace entirely isn't an option since it needs
to get priveleged information about interrupts and chipsets from the
hardware. By moving part of the kernel into userspace and using read only
memory locations the number of calls are reduced and optimisation of these
applications is significant. Apologies for my vague and probably largely
inaccurate description on this one, but hopefully you get the general idea.

Professor Frank Sumner (by far the most mature speaker) told us a little
about his work on the MK1 in Manchester, one of (if not THE) first
electronic computers with memory store. This consisted of a number of
repeated slides (well ok about 2), some unfortunately only half told
anecdotes about Turin, and a constant drumming into us (A definate feeling
of being back at school) that in this machine the least significant bit was
on the left. In fact he told us about this least significant bits unusual
placement around 10 times on and off. I couldn't help feeling this must
relate to some horrendous error he made 50 years ago after which he can do
nothing else but constantly remind himself and others of the fact that...THE
LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT IS ON THE LEFT!

This was though an important glimpse back in history and an amazing reminder
of where computing has come from, and how it has advanced since.

We then went off to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry for a real
demonstration of "The Baby" which was the very first electronic computer
prototype, on which the MK1 was based. This was a complete reconstruction of
the original, using 99% original parts. It was fascinating to see computer
memory based on CRT tubes, and tiny binary dots displaying memory, program
and output on a single tube.

During a talk on "The Baby" by someone else (Sorry don't remember name) he
paused at one point and said dramatically "You may notice something rather
unusual about the binary representation and output, does anyone have a
question at this point?"
He seemed most disappointed that no one could get up the nerve to repeat our
earlier drill, but in the end a colleague of mine, piped up in a small voice
"er...is it that the least significant bit...". I hope the giggling was not
too loud or rude at that point.

After this first day we had a banquet at Yang Sing, good quality chinese
food in great company, a most enjoyable meal.

That sums up Friday (the first day). I'll leave Saturday and Sunday to
someone else to describe, or come back to it later if anyone is actually
interested in my waffling.

Thanks,

Jake.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Cohen" <richard at vmlinuz.org>
To: <gllug at linux.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 12:38 AM
Subject: [Gllug] "Intro to the shell" talk slides up... (and StarOffice and
UKUUG)

> I've finally got my slides up - sorry for the delay.  They're actually my
> original slides, before I had to reformat (and rewrite a few of) them for
> Simon's laptop.
>
> http://palmos.vmlinuz.org/gllug - if anyone has any problems with that
site
> (the connectivity has been a bit dodgy recently) let me know, as I've got
a
> couple of other places I could put it.  Someone on IRC gave me a very URL
> for more similar stuff - http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue58/okopnik.html
>
> StarOffice reminder - I need feedback (the marketing folks want nice
stuff -
> I'll take anything) on StarOffice to pass on.  Good result here will
> probably result in more free CDs (and possibly other things) later, so if
> you're bothered...
>
> UKUUG conference - good conference, much respect to the organisers.  I'm
> tired :-)  I've got a bunch of photos I can put up somewhere if anyone's
> interested (Alasdair, or others, if you want to use them, let me know), or
I
> can write up a short report if people want (John, Jake, James or others
also
> could)...
> Now I've got to try to come up with a good subject to talk on next year...
>
> Cheers
> Richard
>
>
> --
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
> http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug
>
>

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